SEO migration: you migrated your website and leads dropped

What do you notice first when a migration went wrong?

Usually the first thing you notice is leads coming in at a much lower volume. Only after that does someone open Search Console and see impressions and clicks sliding since the switch. Then come the old addresses returning 404 errors, links from other sites or your own social profiles landing on pages that no longer exist and the old domain still showing up in Google weeks later. If you lost traffic after migrating your website, the SEO migration work starts right there, finding what was lost and fixing it. It’s worth saying that ideally you plan the SEO migration and do it before the move, so the disaster never happens.

These problems can happen with a domain change, a platform or CMS change, a new URL structure, the move to HTTPS or a redesign that moved pages around, and each type gets checked a little differently. In a platform or structure change the map from each old URL to its new equivalent carries most of the weight, in an HTTPS move every http address has to redirect to its https version, and a domain change adds what has to be reported in Search Console. If nothing was migrated and rankings dropped anyway, or the new domain doesn’t show up even when you search for its name, the cause is usually something else, and that falls under technical SEO consulting.

What I check first in an SEO migration

The first thing I look at, already in the 30-minute diagnosis, is separating visibility from conversion, because they’re two different problems. Google may be showing you less, or it may be showing you just the same while the migration broke the contact form, the WhatsApp button, the phone links or the GA4 events that tracked them, for example a form that still sends its emails to an inbox on the old domain. Since I work on WordPress, SEO and measurement, I check both in the same diagnosis, and in my opinion that’s what saves the most time, because if what broke is the form or the WhatsApp button, the fix goes there and not into the redirects.

After that I follow these steps:

• I compare impressions, clicks, position and CTR before and after the switch, to get a better idea of which ones dropped and since when.
• I review the 301 redirects one by one to match each old URL with its new equivalent. It matters that the redirects are set up correctly and don’t send everything to the homepage, which is a very common mistake, and that there are no redirect chains.
• I check which old URLs ended up as 404s and which backlinks are still pointing at them.
• In Google Search Console, I use the Change of Address tool (only if the domain or subdomain changed), and I review the submitted sitemap and the indexing of the pages that matter, with a site: search on the new domain as a first look.
• I check the canonicals, noindex and robots.txt on the new domain, in case a block was left over from the staging site.
• I update internal and external links where needed, and I also review the schema and hreflang if there are several languages.
• I make sure the 301s stay in place for as long as possible and generally at least a year, as Google’s guide to moving a site puts it.

Whatever I find, I go ahead and implement it myself or leave it ready for your developer depending on who has hosting access and who you’d rather have touching the site. From the fix onward I check indexing week by week in Search Console, without promising you a number of weeks to get back to where you were, because that depends on how much Google crawls your site and what else changed in the migration.

If you haven’t migrated yet

If you’re about to migrate your website without losing rankings, the list is almost the same, just in execution order:

1. Full backup, URL inventory and baseline metrics, with analytics running on both the old and the new site.
2. SSL on the new domain, hosting that can handle the heavier crawling Google does after the move, and both properties verified in Search Console before moving anything.
3. 301 redirects URL by URL with .htaccess, the Redirection plugin or the hosting panel. Whatever you decide not to migrate should return a 404 or 410.
4. In WordPress, Settings > General and a database search and replace with Better Search Replace or WP-CLI, respecting the serialized data that a manual replace can break.
5. From there, the list above, from Change of Address to the week-by-week follow-up.

I will ask you not to change the domain and the design at the same time. Why? Because if something drops with both changes together it’s very hard to tell which one caused it. Changing one thing at a time, domain first and design later, is also what Google sets out in its general best practices for site moves.

Who you work with

With me, Francisco Moroso, directly and with no intermediaries. I work from Chile and most of my work is on WordPress. I build themes and plugins as well as doing SEO, so the redirects or a form that stopped delivering are things I can fix myself. Recently I worked on the migration of a law firm with two WordPress sites.

Everything stays in your accounts, the redirect map, the access and the data, so if you later move on with someone else you don’t need to ask me for anything. If, once the migration is sorted, you want to keep working on rankings, that’s my technical SEO consulting service, and if you only need the written diagnosis for your team to carry out, it’s a technical SEO audit.